Spring break is here and the initial backpacking/hiking trip has come and gone. I talked about my plans for this trip a couple of weeks ago, but plans changed since I wrote that post. Initially, I had planned on spending a couple of days hiking part of the Ouchita vista trail on the southern side of Lake Ouchita. Well…. That didn’t end up happening. It was going to cost about $50 for a shuttle to get back to our vehicles when we finished the hike, and that didn’t seem worth it. So instead of going down there, we decided to tackle some new territory in the Compton area.

We camped at the top of the Hemmed-in-Hollow trailhead on Friday night and then hiked that trail 5 miles out and back Saturday morning because my buddy had never done it and with all the rain we’ve had I thought that the waterfall would be flowing pretty well (it was).

After we got that finished, we got all of our gear from the trucks and set off on the backpacking part of the trip. We hiked a mile back down the Hemmed-in-Hollow trail until we came to a crossing that let you access the Bench trail. The Bench trail… The single worst part of the entire experience was the time we spent on this trail. I had never done it before so I was going in completely blind, and if you read about it online and look at the elevation changes you see that it’s a gradually descending 4.8 mile connector trail that shouldn’t be bad at all. What it doesn’t tell you online though is that it is a horse trail that is not maintained at all and that if there has been any kind of rain the whole trail will be a giant sloppy mess. Needless to say, we were glad to make it to the end of that stretch.

Once we finished the Bench trail, we descended for a little over a mile on a dirt road until we reached the last section of new trail we were planning on hiking on this trip. The last part was Cecil Cove Loop, which is an 8 mile loop trail that is home to Thunder Canyon. Thunder Canyon is a point of interest about 2 miles into the loop and all we knew about it was that it was supposed to be some kind of waterfall. The hike along the loop was absolutely great. It takes you along and across a creek that looked like it belonged somewhere in Colorado more than in Arkansas. Rushing blue water over giant boulders, and some well-maintained trail to enjoy the beautiful sights and sounds. One of the creek crossings was a little rough because there was no way to keep from getting in the water and walking through freezing water isn’t super fun.

One of the best parts of the loop was Thunder Canyon. We knew that in order to get to the waterfall we had to take an offshoot trail about half a mile from the main trail, but we didn’t know that the entire half mile would be spent hiking right next to a slot canyon that looked like a giant water slide. It was crazy. The water was moving fast and the rock formations were like something you would see in Zion National Park in Utah, definitely not Arkansas. At the end of nature’s water slide we came around a corner and there was a giant waterfall that was feeding water into the whole slot canyon. It was absolutely worth the extra mile of hiking to see all of that.

After we hiked back out of the canyon we set up camp and shut it down for the night. Side note: I did end up trying hammock camping… I found out that I don’t love it if it’s going to be pretty cold throughout the night (it got down to the high 20’s where we ended up camping because we were near the creek). I didn’t hate it, but I think I would’ve been a little more comfortable on the ground.

The next morning we got up and set off to finish the loop. About two-ish miles from where we camped for the night we came up on a split in the trail. We could see that if we stayed right we would be on the main trail, but if we went left we could go about 600 yards back into this gorge with a cool looking horseshoe shaped bluff. We were making good time, so we decided to take the detour and we couldn’t have made a better decision. As we made it to the bluff you could see that there was an opening at the base, and when we got there we found out that it was the mouth to a massive cave! It was the largest cave that I have ever encountered in the wild. We went in and checked it out and we could hear that there was definitely some kind of underground water source flowing back inside the cavern, but we didn’t have enough light or experience to venture far enough to find it.

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After the cave, it was quite a bit of ascending and crossing quite a few small streams until we made it back to the road we came in on. We decided that we were just going to hike all the way to the trucks on the road instead of dealing with the horse trail again, so we had about 4 miles to cover before we were done. After about a mile of hiking there was a group of overland trail drivers that let us hitch a ride with them to the trucks, so we didn’t even have to finish out the last few miles!

I would consider the trip to be a success overall. We found out that there is a parking lot at the start of the Cecil Cove Loop, so you could go in the summertime and bring your swim suit and make a day trip out of it. It would be super easy to get to all of the best spots from the parking lot and if it was hot enough it would be awesome to chill in the creek or even in the slot canyon! I will definitely be going back!